Maintenance and operational training are components of training provided to several segments of industry, government, and the military services. For example, operators and technicians are trained to operate and maintain complex systems, such as aircraft, ships, submarines, nuclear power plants, and the like. Some training may be mandated by regulatory agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration.
Training is distinguished from education or academia. Education or academia may be considered to be more theoretical and abstract, with less emphasis on applied skills, than training. As such, training can take place in a classroom, on-the-job (OJT), just-in-time (JIT), at home, in the military, and the like.
Creating a training course entails developing, configuring, and assembling the training course. Creating current operational and maintenance classroom training is a time-and-labor intensive process.
Developing a training course currently entails a training specialist manually locating applicable training media and materials (such as photos, text, videos, and the like), collating and coping these materials, and inserting them into an authoring-publishing system to create training courseware.
The training courseware may be marked with a legend, such as “For Training Use Only”, “Not For Operational or Maintenance Use”, or the like, to ensure that the training courseware is not used to operate or maintain in-service systems in the field. Thus, the training courseware may be considered “dedicated” training courseware that is maintained separate from operational and maintenance materials. This can result in a “stove piped” environment, thereby resulting in increased time and costs.
Currently, a training specialist must manually maintain currency and configuration of the training course. To that end, a training specialist must be kept apprised of changes to operational configurations of deployed, in-service systems and to planned engineering changes, revisions, and the like. The training courseware is revised to reflect these changes to operational configurations and engineering changes and revisions. Often, this revision is done in parallel with revision of the original support documentation (that is, the operational and/or maintenance documentation). When the maintenance courseware and the original support documentation are “stove piped” from each other, increased costs can result. This is because the revisions to the stove piped documents represent duplicated efforts made in parallel with each other.
Furthermore, in some applications, the dedicated training media may be limited in applicability to one installation of a system, especially in highly customized applications. For example, a training course for a particular subject, such as maintenance of a particular system, may be applicable to only one aircraft with a particular tail number or to only one ship with a particular hull number. As a result, a different version of a training course may have to be developed for the same subject for the same model aircraft with a different tail number (even if the two aircraft are owned by the same owner) or for another ship in a same class of ships (such as two Ohio Class submarines).
The configured training courseware is then assembled for use in classrooms.
Presenting a training course is also a time-and-labor intensive process. Students (who can include operators, management, maintenance technician, trainers, suppliers, employees of the system's manufacturer, regulators, military personnel, and the like) may have to travel from their place-of-work to a central training facility and then sit in a classroom for up to eight hours a day for up to sixteen weeks per course. In such a presentation scenario, students are not able to receive training on a just-in-time basis to support operations or maintenance. Moreover, operators or maintenance technicians are not easily able to access training media on an as-needed basis if difficulties are encountered while performing a given task in the field.
The foregoing examples of related art and limitations associated therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.